Aurora Leigh (excerpts)

Aurora Leigh (excerpts)

[Book 1]

I am like,

They tell me, my dear father. Broader brows

Howbeit, upon a slenderer undergrowth

Of delicate features, -- paler, near as grave ;

But then my mothers smile breaks up the whole,

And makes it better sometimes than itself.

So, nine full years, our days were hid with God

Among his mountains : I was just thirteen,

Still growing like the plants from unseen roots

In tongue-tied Springs, -- and suddenly awoke

To full life and life s needs and agonies,

With an intense, strong, struggling heart beside

A stone-dead father. Life, struck sharp on death,

Makes awful lightning. His last word was, `Love --

`Love, my child, love, love ! -- (then he had done with grief)

`Love, my child. Ere I answered he was gone,

And none was left to love in all the world.

There, ended childhood. What succeeded next

I recollect as, after fevers, men

Thread back the passage of delirium,

Missing the turn still, baffled by the door ;

Smooth endless days, notched here and there with knives ;

A weary, wormy darkness, spurrd i the flank

With flame, that it should eat and end itself

Like some tormented scorpion. Then at last

I do remember clearly, how there came

A stranger with authority, not right,

(I thought not) who commanded, caught me up

From old Assuntas neck ; how, with a shriek,

She let me go, -- while I, with ears too full

Of my fathers silence, to shriek back a word,

In all a childs astonishment at grief

Stared at the wharf-edge where she stood and moaned,

My poor Assunta, where she stood and moaned !

The white walls, the blue hills, my Italy,

Drawn backward from the shuddering steamer-deck,

Like one in anger drawing back her skirts

Which supplicants catch at. Then the bitter sea

Inexorably pushed between us both,

And sweeping up the ship with my despair

Threw us out as a pasture to the stars.

Ten nights and days we voyaged on the deep ;

Ten nights and days, without the common face

Of any day or night ; the moon and sun

Cut off from the green reconciling earth,

To starve into a blind ferocity

And glare unnatural ; the very sky

(Dropping its bell-net down upon the sea

As if no human heart should scape alive,)

Bedraggled with the desolating salt,

Until it seemed no more that holy heaven

To which my father went. All new and strange

The universe turned stranger, for a child.

Then, land ! -- then, England ! oh, the frosty cliffs

Looked cold upon me. Could I find a home

Among those mean red houses through the fog ?

And when I heard my fathers language first

From alien lips which had no kiss for mine

I wept aloud, then laughed, then wept, then wept,

And some one near me said the child was mad

Through much sea-sickness. The train swept us on.

Was this my fathers England ? the great isle ?

The ground seemed cut up from the fellowship

Of verdure, field from field, as man from man ;

The skies themselves looked low and positive,

As almost you could touch them with a hand,

And dared to do it they were so far off

From Gods celestial crystals ; all things blurred

And dull and vague. Did Shakspeare and his mates

Absorb the light here ? -- not a hill or stone

With heart to strike a radiant colour up

Or active outline on the indifferent air.

I think I see my fathers sister stand

Upon the hall-step of her country-house

To give me welcome. She stood straight and calm,

Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight

As if for taming accidental thoughts

From possible pulses ; brown hair pricked with grey

By frigid use of life, (she was not old

Although my fathers elder by a year)

A nose drawn sharply yet in delicate lines ;

A close mild mouth, a little soured about

The ends, through speaking unrequited loves

Or peradventure niggardly half-truths ;

Eyes of no colour, -- once they might have smiled,

But never, never have forgot themselves

In smiling ; cheeks, in which was yet a rose

Of perished summers, like a rose in a book,

Kept more for ruth than pleasure, -- if past bloom,

Past fading also.

She had lived, well say,

A harmless life, she called a virtuous life,

A quiet life, which was not life at all,

(But that, she had not lived enough to know)

Between the vicar and the country squires,

The lord-lieutenant looking down sometimes

From the empyrean to assure their souls

Against chance-vulgarisms, and, in the abyss

The apothecary, looked on once a year

To prove their soundness of humility.

The poor-club exercised her Christian gifts

Of knitting stockings, stitching petticoats,

Because we are of one flesh after all

And need one flannel (with a proper sense

Of difference in the quality) -- and still

The book-club, guarded from your modern trick

Of shaking dangerous questions from the crease,

Preserved her intellectual. She had lived

A sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage,

Accounting that to leap from perch to perch

Was act and joy enough for any bird.

Dear heaven, how silly are the things that live

In thickets, and eat berries !

I, alas,

A wild bird scarcely fledged, was brought to her cage,

And she was there to meet me. Very kind.

Bring the clean water, give out the fresh seed.

She stood upon the steps to welcome me,

Calm, in black garb. I clung about her neck, --

Young babes, who catch at every shred of wool

To draw the new light closer, catch and cling

Less blindly. In my ears, my fathers word

Hummed ignorantly, as the sea in shells,

`Love, love, my child. She, black there with my grief,

Might feel my love -- she was his sister once,

I clung to her. A moment, she seemed moved,

Kissed me with cold lips, suffered me to cling,

And drew me feebly through the hall into

The room she sate in.

There, with some strange spasm

Of pain and passion, she wrung loose my hands

Imperiously, and held me at arms length,

And with two grey-steel naked-bladed eyes

Searched through my face, -- ay, stabbed it through and through,

Through brows and cheeks and chin, as if to find

A wicked murderer in my innocent face,

If not here, there perhaps. Then, drawing breath,

She struggled for her ordinary calm

And missed it rather, -- told me not to shrink,

As if she had told me not to lie or swear, --

`She loved my father, and would love me too

As long as I deserved it. Very kind.

[Book 5]

AURORA LEIGH, be humble. Shall I hope

To speak my poems in mysterious tune

With man and nature ? -- with the lava-lymph

That trickles from successive galaxies

Still drop by drop adown the finger of God

In still new worlds ? -- with summer-days in this ?

That scarce dare breathe they are so beautiful ?--

With springs delicious trouble in the ground,

Tormented by the quickened blood of roots,

And softly pricked by golden crocus-sheaves

In token of the harvest-time of flowers ?--

With winters and with autumns, -- and beyond,

With the human hearts large seasons, when it hopes

And fears, joys, grieves, and loves ? -- with all that strain

Of sexual passion, which devours the flesh

In a sacrament of souls ? with mothers breasts

Which, round the new-made creatures hanging there,

Throb luminous and harmonious like pure spheres ? --

With multitudinous life, and finally

With the great escapings of ecstatic souls,

Who, in a rush of too long prisoned flame,

Their radiant faces upward, burn away

This dark of the body, issuing on a world,

Beyond our mortal ? -- can I speak my verse

Sp plainly in tune to these things and the rest,

That men shall feel it catch them on the quick,

As having the same warrant over them

To hold and move them if they will or no,

Alike imperious as the primal rhythm

Of that theurgic nature ? I must fail,

Who fail at the beginning to hold and move

One man, -- and he my cousin, and he my friend,

And he born tender, made intelligent,

Inclined to ponder the precipitous sides

Of difficult questions ; yet, obtuse to me,

Of me, incurious ! likes me very well,

And wishes me a paradise of good,

Good looks, good means, and good digestion, -- ay,

But otherwise evades me, puts me off

With kindness, with a tolerant gentleness, --

Too light a book for a grave mans reading ! Go,

Aurora Leigh : be humble.

There it is,

We women are too apt to look to One,

Which proves a certain impotence in art.

We strain our natures at doing something great,

Far less because it s something great to do,

Than haply that we, so, commend ourselves

As being not small, and more appreciable

To some one friend. We must have mediators

Betwixt our highest conscience and the judge ;

Some sweet saints blood must quicken in our palms

Or all the life in heaven seems slow and cold :

Good only being perceived as the end of good,

And God alone pleased, -- thats too poor, we think,

And not enough for us by any means.

Ay, Romney, I remember, told me once

We miss the abstract when we comprehend.

We miss it most when we aspire, -- and fail.

Yet, so, I will not. -- This vile womans way

Of trailing garments, shall not trip me up :

I ll have no traffic with the personal thought

In arts pure temple. Must I work in vain,

Without the approbation of a man ?

It cannot be ; it shall not. Fame itself,

That approbation of the general race,

Presents a poor end, (though the arrow speed,

Shot straight with vigorous finger to the white,)

And the highest fame was never reached except

By what was aimed above it. Art for art,

And good for God Himself, the essential Good !

We ll keep our aims sublime, our eyes erect,

Although our woman-hands should shake and fail ;

And if we fail .. But must we ? --

Shall I fail ?

The Greeks said grandly in their tragic phrase,

`Let no one be called happy till his death.

To which I add, -- Let no one till his death

Be called unhappy. Measure not the work

Until the day s out and the labour done,

Then bring your gauges. If the days work s scant,

Why, call it scant ; affect no compromise ;

And, in that we have nobly striven at least,

Deal with us nobly, women though we be.

And honour us with truth if not with praise.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning